Its all gone a bit quiet

This post, as much as anything, is designed to tell everyone that I am in fact still alive. I just haven’t felt a lot like writing lately, but in the last week I’ve really started to feel the urge to get this thing moving again. There’s plenty to talk about and plenty to reflect on; a new government means a new set of challenges, and with the summer approaching, there are many new possibilities.

The elections were an insightful time, a reminder to myself that I keep a fairly clear distinction between the role of political parties and parliamentary democracy and the role of campaigning and activism: Parliament runs the country, we create the change.

The change that seems most likely right now involves that wonderful series of events that have popped up: the purple protests calling for voting reform. Its not a sexy campaign. No chimpanzes, whales or polar bears will be in any way affected, at least not this decade, but the time and the energy seems to be there to create some motion on this topic. But it alone cannot bring change…

We’ve had a couple of assaults on women’s status in society already from this government. First, because apparently you can’t trust women when they claim they’ve been raped, and second because apparently if you’re a woman and you don’t decide to stand for power, you’re letting all women down (rather than excercising your hard won right to make that decision for yourself) – I speak of Yvette Cooper and some of the comments she has been facing, not least from Cameron himself.

I’ve been considering many of the issues around Prosperity, Power and Privilege. Experiencing a conference through the medium of twitter recently, I came across a quote I will no doubt return to: “The opposite of poverty is not prosperity, indeed, the opposite of both is community”. I think it sums things up rather well, and is a reminder that money is not a linear thing: the usefulness of having more of it falls faster the more you have, and often our lives would be happier if we could take the decision not to buy things (though this is predicated on us having the money to consider spending in the first case, and plenty of us mortals lack that). But actually having the guts to talk about this sort of thing in front of people who might be a bit hostile, well thats a different matter all together…

And so thats a snapshot of some of the things that have been rolling around in my mind for the last week or two. Hopefully I’ll have a more coherent post sometime in the next week for you.